While he emphasized, in an e-mail exchange, that increased vaccination is still the best way to lower the pertussis rates at present, in the long run public health officials can't avoid facing the evidence of bacterial mutation and "should strive for pertussis vaccines that protect longer."

Among the road blocks, there are, for starters, the numerous theories -- highly loquacious in cyberspace -- that contend not only that flu vaccination is overtly dangerous, but that there is a systematic effort to delude the public about those dangers.